Oil Prices: give Stephen Moore some credit Moore rightfully criticized a USA Today headline “Oil Prices Hit Highest Since Sept. 1990” and has been saying that we should look at oil and gasoline prices in inflation adjusted terms. Now I’m not one to praise NRO writers especially when they point out what is often taught […]

Low & middle income groups bear burden of the tax cuts William G. Gale, Peter R. Orszag, and Isaac Shapiro have provided an analysis of who gains from the recent tax cuts and who loses in an analysis that respects the long-run government budget constraint. Households with incomes over $1 million have current tax cuts […]

Capitalists of America Unite! Via Brad DeLong, Josh Bivens of EPI notes that most of the “tepid” economic growth over the last couple of years has gone to capital income and not labor income (tepid as in James Carville’s reaction to his wife’s euphoria over this anemic recovery).

Plame Investigation Update Robert Novak tells the world Valerie Plame is a CIA operative 10.5 months ago and George W. Bush finally takes action: consults with his own attorney. Had this occurred under the watch of George H. W. Bush, the informers would have been fired before Labor Day 2003. But George W. Bush lets […]

Cato Institute proposes fiscal responsibity Well – sort of. Chris Edwards has put forth “Downsizing the Federal Government” with $300 billion in proposed spending cuts by 2009. Highlights: Eliminating the Dept. of Education and its $62.8 billion budget. Eliminating HUD and its $46.2 billion budget. Reducing the USDA by 38% saving $29.7 billion. Cutting HHS […]

OPEC at 91% capacity MSNBC is running a story on the current oil price with a table of the production v. production capacity of the OPEC-11 (including Iraq). Total productive capacity per day = 30.77 million barrels with current production at 28.1 million barrels. Eight of the nations are at full capacity according to their […]

National Review’s profit support per new job National Review’s Jerry Bowyer has once again provided professors with another “lies, damn lies, and statistics” classic. To convince NRO readers that the Clinton job growth was a bubble, while the recent job growth is sustainable, he plots the change in profits relative to the increase in employment […]

National Review v. Alice Rivlin on Fiscal Policy With the CBO projecting gross Federal debt to rise from its $6760 billion level at the end of 2003 to $9920 billion level by the end of 2008 (an average annual increase of $632 billion a year), the comment from Johan Goldberg at The Corner on National […]

Winning the Senate Wandering over to Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama’s campaign blog, I see some very encouraging poll results: * Overall, Barack leads 52 percent to 30 percent * Barack leads among independent voters, 46-27 percent * Among voters who consider themselves “very conservative”, 31 percent intend to vote for Barack * Among white […]

What puts the Angry in Angry Bear? Stories like this: The FBI is investigating an intercepted Iranian message that alleges Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi told Tehran officials that the United States had broken Iran’s secret code, U.S. officials said. The message alleges Chalabi said he had been told about the code-breaking by a drunken […]